Étiquette : Ruth Duerr

Ongoing stewardship is required to keep data collections and archives in existence. Scientific data collections may face a range of risk factors that could hinder, constrain, or limit current or future data use.

Identifying such risk factors to data use is a key step in preventing or minimizing data loss. This paper presents an analysis of data risk factors that scientific data collections may face, and a data risk assessment matrix to support data risk assessments to help ameliorate those risks.

The goals of this work are to inform and enable effective data risk assessment by: a) individuals and organizations who manage data collections, and b) individuals and organizations who want to help to reduce the risks associated with data preservation and stewardship.

The data risk assessment framework presented in this paper provides a platform from which risk assessments can begin, and a reference point for discussions of data stewardship resource allocations and priorities.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of public data to the modern economy and to scientific progress, long-term investment in the repositories that manage and disseminate scientific data in easily accessible-ways remains elusive. Repositories are asked to demonstrate that there is a net value of their data and services to justify continued funding or attract new funding sources.

Here, representatives from a number of environmental and Earth science repositories evaluate approaches for assessing the costs and benefits of publishing scientific data in their repositories, identifying various metrics that repositories typically use to report on the impact and value of their data products and services, plus additional metrics that would be useful but are not typically measured.

We rated each metric by (a) the difficulty of implementation by our specific repositories and (b) its importance for value determination. As managers of environmental data repositories, we find that some of the most easily obtainable data-use metrics (such as data downloads and page views) may be less indicative of value than metrics that relate to discoverability and broader use.

Other intangible but equally important metrics (e.g., laws or regulations impacted, lives saved, new proposals generated), will require considerable additional research to describe and develop, plus resources to implement at scale.

As value can only be determined from the point of view of a stakeholder, it is likely that multiple sets of metrics will be needed, tailored to specific stakeholder needs. Moreover, economically based analyses or the use of specialists in the field are expensive and can happen only as resources permit.